Grantville Gazette, Volume 68

by Bjorn Hasseler

  Nearly every condo balcony had a red lantern. Chinese New Year? That meant Singapore or Hong Kong.

  A free-fall sensation swept up from Michael's toes as proprioception kicked in and his neuroimage integrated with the chassis. A dizzying shift like a camera pulling focus, and suddenly those were his fingers prickling with the sudden shock of neural input. His body, slumped in the white storage cradle. His skull, skewered on the neuroprinter spindle like a chunk of chicken satay.

  The chassis had to mean Singapore. A high-quality synflesh chassis wasn't cheap to maintain, so Ozumi clients in Hong Kong preferred to spin up their human resources in a virtual environment. Whereas Singapore was all about the full-dimensional experience, so clients were willing to pay to have an Ozumi human resource in the synflesh.

  Unless that had changed since he'd last been active to fulfill an order. How long had he been in archive? He was a Geek-class resource; his rankings depended on staying up to date with the newest technology. Technology evolved quickly. So did kids growing up without their fathers.

  How much time had he lost?

  The question took on weight and pressure, but he still couldn't speak to ask. Mechanically, he could flex his tongue and lick his dry lips, but words slipped past the edges of his consciousness like fluttering grey moths. Aphasia—his language center was still only partially transferred.

  Movement inside his peripheral vision recalled Michael to the three people in the room.

  A girl with neon pink hair sat on the edge of the conference table, swinging her combat boots impatiently. Her puffy tulle skirt looked like something she'd stolen from a five-year-old's closet.

  Next to her, a boy the same age—early twenties—lounged in a black leather chair, elbows propped on the armrests, fingers steepled. His eyebrows were comic M-shaped arches and his hair was gelled into neat spikes. Trendy haircut, trendy sports jacket.

  The last man had salt-and-pepper hair, a fuzzy caterpillar mustache, and an ugly mustard-yellow tie. He was twice the age of the boy and girl, but his stiff posture and two-piece suit pegged him as an underling. By body language, the boy was the alpha in the room; the girl and the man kept checking his face.

  "Somebody's home," the boy said, staring at Michael. "You can tell. Something about the eyes." He spoke English fluently, without an accent—definitely Singaporean. The bilingual education policy had been in effect here since 1978.

  The girl frowned. "I thought he'd look more impressive."

  Several retorts leapt to Michael's tongue—the Broca sector must have finished transferring. He had verbal acuity and speech production now. He had to clench his teeth to keep from launching an explanation of the resource selection process. He could talk about algorithms later, once they'd briefed him.

  He coughed to clear his throat, and the clients jumped. "Excuse me," he said. "Transfer isn't 100% yet, but could you tell me the date?"

  "January 31st," said the girl. "Two days before New Year."

  "What new year?"

  "Year of the Dragon."

  Michael shook his head. "What's that in Gregorian?"

  The girl blinked. "What?"

  "2060," said the boy.

  2060. Michael felt his mind retreat from the reality of the chassis for a long, rushing moment. Four years.

  Just a moment ago, he'd been in east Texas in May 2056, fulfilling an order for a military base camp. Michael's mother and Sam had driven in from Dallas and rented a hotel in the nearest town, and he'd sneaked away to visit them every night, returning to work in the morning on the wings of espresso. Sam had been five years old, all big eyes under a mop of curly hair, a miniature force of chaos and destruction.

  Michael had fifteen orders in his OTP contract. He'd chosen fifteen over five or twenty-five because the fifteen-order contract optimized the balance of personal cost to benefit—years of his life against the generous family support stipend and severance package.

  The military base had been his fourteenth order. Freedom had been close enough to touch with synflesh fingers—a few weeks, one month tops, until he could rejoin his family.

  And now, in a blink, 2060.

  Sam would be eight now. Nine in less than a month, on February 17th.

  Grief hit Michael like a needle in the eye, piercing down through his chest and locking up his throat. In its wake came the froth of irrational rage. Amygdala, right on schedule.

  "Why is it taking so long?" the girl whined.

  Michael swallowed back his rage. The developers had improved the chassis interface since 2056; he could feel the lump in his throat as if it were his real body. His voice came out with a slight rasp. "A neuroimage is several exabytes. On fiber this would take longer than your lifetime, but OTP transfer uses Sosa-Ubunti spaces."

  The boy frowned. "Gina, did you enter the order correctly? No offense," he added to Michael, "but we need a Hero-class resource. A Hero wouldn't know a Sosa-Ubunti space from a French pastry. You must be a Geek."

  "The Ozumi resource selection algorithms are very sophisticated," Michael said. "You may think you need a Hero, but resource selection takes all the factors of your problem into account and finds the best match in the Ozumi database." The words rattled off his tongue, worn smooth from practice. Clients always wanted a dashing Hero or charismatic Rockstar. Geeks were underwhelming until they went to work.

  The neuroprinter made a sudden whirring sound, and the OTP application chimed. Michael turned his head to check the transfer hub display. Checksums matched; transfer complete.

  One last order to complete his contract. He could be back home in time for Sam's ninth birthday.

  He detached the spindle from his skull and climbed gingerly out of the storage cradle. The bones in his knee popped when he stepped onto the plush grey carpet.

  "Right then. What seems to be the problem?"

  ****

  "What we really need is a Hero," Gina Ngô said for the fifth time. "Lee, we should call Anna, our client rep."

  Fingers flying across touchscreen controls on the conference table, her brother ignored her. Near his elbow, condensation slid down a forgotten glass of neon green liquid. Alex, the mustached man, had offered Michael a similar glass, but he'd declined in favor of bottled water. That, at least, was familiar; he recognized the bottled brand from his second assignment in Singapore in 2054.

  Cursory introductions while they settled around the conference table had identified Lee and Gina as twins and business partners, and Alex as their personal assistant. The glassboard wall showed a flurry of pages as Lee pulled up information. "Our company is called CelebriSee. We license and distribute the SSF neuroimage—you know, for low-res streaming—of two dozen entertainment personalities."

  Michael nodded, though his heart sank. In 2056, Ozumi's neuroimage format had been cutting-edge, far ahead of the competition. SSF, whatever that was, hadn't existed, and low-res neuroimage would have been an oxymoron.

  Like its computing counterpart the disk image, a neuroimage was a complete human brain in digital format. Unlike a disk image, OTP was a destructive transfer, leaving no data behind. The same technology that enabled OTP to transfer exabytes per hour also timed out on a non-destructive copy, due to some mathematical issue with the homotopy of Sosa-Ubunti spaces. The neuroimage could be moved but copying a neuroimage was impossible. One neuroimage per human brain, no duplicates.

  Or rather, copying a neuroimage had been impossible. Four years ago.

  Michael popped the catches on his OTP resource kit and examined the contents. A tablet, contact patches and lenses, and a wallet of legacy resources: credit cards and Singapore dollars. He slid the contact lenses into his eyes and powered up the tablet. A translucent overlay flickered at the corners of his vision. Default settings, but he didn't have time to customize. He switched to keyboard mode and searched SSF.

  Information flooded back like a gush of rain on the arid spaces in his brain. SSF stood for Sacks Streaming Format, a new neuroimage format that only stored ce
rtain functions. SSF image licensing was popular with public figures like politicians and celebrities, who distributed their neuroimages for marketing campaigns, charity appearances, and book signings.

  How did SSF work? The OTP neuroimage had partitions, but you couldn't transfer just the visual cortex, or just Broca's area. Compression, maybe. If long-term memory was compressed, working memory would be sufficient to smile and shake hands. A smaller neuroimage could transfer over fiber; it wouldn't need the speed of Sosa-Ubunti spaces.

  "You know who this is?" Lee asked.

  Michael cleared away his search results so he could see the glassboard. Lee had pulled up a webpage with chrome-on-black graphic design, featuring a glamour shot of a boy with spiky hair.

  Face shot. Might as well be an emoticon for Michael's purposes. His prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize faces, was a congenital neurological defect, so it came with the neuroimage.

  Where was the pop-up from his Façade application? Oh, he hadn't installed it yet. He hurriedly located and pulled it from the app store.

  While the app downloaded, he studied the photo. The boy's spiky haircut was similar to Lee's, but Lee had the distinctive M-shaped eyebrows. Michael searched the photo for other clues. Silver earring. No tattoos. No facial hair.

  The download over wireless was taking too long. He needed to say something. "I don't believe so, but do you have video?"

  Lee gave away the answer by typing Jonny Milq into the search bar. A music video for a song called "No Way Out" appeared in the results and started to autoplay, a mute whirlwind of limbs and flashing lights. Lee pushed the video out to fullscreen.

  A techno beat pumped through the glassboard's speakers. A floppy-haired boy and backup dancers swiveled and gyrated through a parking garage. Most of the lyrics were Chinese, except "no way out," repeated in the chorus. The camera kept cutting to close-ups of the boy's soulful gaze, so despite the leather jackets and gratuitous shots of Lexus and Mercedes grilles, Michael deduced that it was a love song.

  A stray thought: what kind of music did Sam like? Was eight old enough to develop musical preferences? Definitely old enough to appreciate the luxury cars in the video, though Sam's vehicular taste had always run to construction cranes and dump trucks.

  A translucent notification scrolled across his vision: Download complete. Michael booted the Façade installer and went through set-up at record speed. A moment later, scope icons appeared and scanned the room, running the facial recognition algorithms his brain lacked.

  The app tagged Lee Ngô from his Be U dating profile, Gina Ngô from her myTV channel, and Alex Gāo from a professional networking site. A fourth scope skittered about the music video, jumping off the faces of backup dancers. The camera cut to the floppy-haired boy, and the scope locked on and identified him: Jonny Milq, a Chinese pop star. Just with a different haircut.

  "Jonny Milq," Gina confirmed. Her sneer eased off, replaced by a touch of pride. "The rising star of C-Pop."

  "Is Milq really his name?" He got an incredulous look from Gina, and shrugged. "Just curious. There was a U.S. ad campaign…"

  "Yes, the hackers dug that up." Lee opened another video, this one a shakycam with the whites blown out.

  After a moment the white-balance kicked in and darkened the image into view—three spiky-haired boys in a coffee shop. Two of them were arguing; one shoved the other and he tripped back and toppled a chair with a crash. The third came toward the camera, his face ugly with anger.

  Michael's Façade scope spun and locked. Jonny Milq, every one of them.

  The third Milq spat something at the camera and his palm covered the lens, wiping the video to black. Chrome letters faded up: got Milq?

  Michael frowned. "This isn't one of Milq's promos?"

  Lee shook his head. "Those aren't licensed SSFs," Lee said. "We have a distribution contract for Jonny's image, but the release date isn't for another two weeks. He's touring Southeast Asia and doesn't want his own SSFs stealing his publicity."

  "They're pirated copies." Gina pointed at the view counter below the video. "They've gotten 7 million hits in two days."

  "Could it be a hoax?" Michael asked. "Are we sure this is a real scene and not CGI?"

  Gina snorted. "With that white-balance?"

  "Chassis with responsive faces aren't cheap," Michael persisted. Façade had identified Milq, so the chassis had his face. Only the high-end chassis reshaped their synflesh to mimic the facial map stored in the neuroimage.

  But Gina gave a dismissive wave. "Not here in Singapore. Here they're affordable enough to be popular."

  "We can't assume it's a hoax," Lee said. "If the hackers have real SSFs and chassis to house them, then this video is just a teaser for something bigger. Jonny is threatening to sue if we don't contain the leak."

  "You keep calling them hackers," Michael observed. "You think a third party hacked your system to get the SSFs?"

  "No, actually, I don't." Lee leaned back in his chair, his boyish face set into grim lines. "Jonny's SSF is encrypted, but it can be decoded by anyone with the encryption keys."

  Encryption technology changed rapidly, but human nature didn't. Michael added up the pieces. "You think an insider leaked Milq."

  "That's why we need a Hero," Gina broke in, belligerent. "We want to interview our employees, but we don't want to scare them off. So the interviews will be behind-the-scenes pieces for a company webcast. We need someone who looks like a reporter, someone charismatic."

  "Gina." Lee pinched the bridge of his nose. "Michael, no offense. We understand that Geek skills are optimized for technical rather than social challenges."

  He didn't withdraw his sister's point, Michael noticed. As twins, they would play off each other; Gina could be blunt and rude, with Lee to smooth things over.

  "I understand your concerns," Michael said, "but a technical investigation sounds like what you need. There's a lot of information in an electronic trail."

  "Not this time," Gina said.

  Michael sighed. "Look. I can explain the resource selection algorithms, but why don't you see for yourself?" He indicated the glassboard. "Send your order to the Ozumi database again to rerun the resource selection."

  Gina gave him a suspicious glance, but activated her touchscreen and took control of the glassboard. She booted the Ozumi user interface and choose the prompt to create a new order.

  Michael folded his arms, waiting. He didn't have any doubt that resource selection would find him again. The algorithms didn't make mistakes. He suggested this exercise to doubtful clients because it let him see how they described their problem in the order questionnaire.

  Gina used Lee's description almost verbatim. With a triumphant stab of her finger, she submitted the order for resource selection. The Ozumi logo spun while the algorithms ran through the database.

  Resource selected! a pop-up announced. A profile appeared on the screen: Thomas L. Renner, P.I., Hero class. Renner looked like he'd stepped straight out of detective noir: worn tan duster, rugged jaw shadowed with dark stubble, and cap tilted at a rakish angle.

  "That's more like it," Gina said, with satisfaction.

  Lee sat forward in his chair.

  Michael stared. Resource selection should have pulled Michael's profile again. "You must have changed something in the parameters." The algorithms had built-in redundancy to account for small changes in initial conditions, but apparently not enough.

  Gina and Lee weren't listening; they looked mesmerized as they scrolled down through Renner's profile. Hero charisma; Michael's profile couldn't compete. He was losing them.

  If Ozumi recalled Michael and sent Renner instead, Michael would go back into archive. A recall didn't count towards the fifteen assignments in his contract.

  "Look." His voice was too sharp, so he dialed it back. "You can go back to your client rep at any time, but I'm here and available. Give me security credentials to your system and I'll do some research, have some information for you by morning."<
br />
  Lee tore his gaze away from a list of Renner's martial arts. "That sounds fair. You can use my office. Alex, get him set up, please."

  ****

  Six hours later, when the first orange threads of dawn slid through the water of Marina Bay, visible in flashing glimpses from Lee's office window, Michael had aching eyes, a throbbing head, and doubts.

  CelebriSee's digital infrastructure had prioritized budget over security. Michael had found white papers on neuroimage encryption, but soon realized he didn't need to understand the latest technology, because CelebriSee wasn't using it. Their encryption method wasn't complex: if you had the encryption keys, there were no technical limitations on what you could do with the SSF.

  He'd also checked on forensic watermarks as a possible avenue of investigation. Creative content providers such as film studios and music groups watermarked their delivered files with an invisible code. The watermark could later be used to identify which delivery had been pirated. Since SSF neuroimages used the same licensing and distribution principles, they should be able to use watermarks…but CelebriSee's system wasn't set up to do so.

  The Ozumi algorithms didn't make mistakes. But Gina had been correct—the electronic trail was useless. What did resource selection expect him to do?

  He swiveled his chair and stared out the window. Shards of sunlight slanted off glass and steel. The avenue far below was already congested with traffic. Singapore wouldn't be a bad place to live, except for the humidity. Good public transit. Excellent schools.

  He checked the clock. 7 A.M. Japan was an hour ahead; Anna Chen would be at her desk in the client rep bullpen by now. He found her name on his tablet's contact list.

  The tablet made a bubbly ringing noise while it placed the call, then cut off as a girl's smile appeared. She had a short, sleek bob and a tiny black mole on her cheek. Michael loved that mole—he didn't need the Façade app to identify Anna, no matter how she changed her hair.

  "Cienega!" After nine orders partnered with Michael, Anna knew how to pronounce his name correctly, emphasis on the EN. "You're active! Been a while, huh?"